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Bees may hold the key to the exploration of Mars. The American space agency Nasa is funding research into a theory that understanding how bees navigate around flowerbeds may aid the development of a lightweight unmanned aircraft to explore the Red Planet. A bee’s sesame-seed-size brain is capable of storing complex maps and allowing accurate navigation.

All of which is good news for Professor Mandyam Srinivasan, of the Australian National University, who has been studying them for 25 years. Nasa has given him £1.8 million to find out how the brains perform their complex tasks. “We